Metal nanoparticles are an increasingly important industrial material. Due in part to their high surface area and high reactivity, metal nanoparticles may be used in a variety of applications, such as reaction catalysis (including serving as a reaction substrate), improving the behavior and properties of materials, and drug delivery. Particular applications for nanoparticles include serving as a catalyst for the synthesis of carbon nanotubes, serving as a catalyst for hydrogen gas synthesis, and production of metal hydrides.
Many techniques are currently used for the production of metal nanoparticles. Current techniques include plasma or laser-driven gas phase reactions, evaporation-condensation mechanisms, and various wet chemical techniques. This plurality of techniques is due in part to the fact that no current technique provides a reliable, simple, and low-cost method for production of nanoparticles of a controlled size. Some current techniques may produce particles of a desirable size, but with poor crystallinity or an unpredictable distribution of phases within the nanoparticles. Other techniques suffer from an inability to control the distribution of sizes around a desired nanoparticle size. Still other nanoparticle synthesis techniques require specialized equipment, long processing times, or expensive specialty chemicals.
One potentially attractive wet chemical technique for synthesis of metal nanoparticles is thermal decomposition, as these reactions may be carried using relatively simple equipment. However, currently known methods of metal nanoparticle formation using thermal decomposition require addition of a separate surfactant, thus increasing the complexity and cost of the method.
What is needed is a simple, reliable, and low cost thermal decomposition method for producing crystalline metal nanoparticles without use of a separate surfactant that allows for control of the average particle size while minimizing the amount of variance in the particle sizes.